In modern Britain, there is not usually a debate about what “we” should do with, say, the retail industry or the brewing industry. Broadly speaking, it is assumed they will work it out for themselves. But when it comes to agriculture, it is always “we”. “We” must produce more food, or less. “We” must do it more extensively, or more intensively. Already the green lobby, more political and therefore quicker than their opponents, have started producing papers. “We” must pay for smaller farms, says the Campaign to Protect Rural England. “We” must enforce, says the National Trust, the principle that “Nature should be abundant everywhere”.

The countryside is visible to almost all, and its character affects our health and spirits and secures the wellbeing of birds and beasts, trees and flowers. The government should have a care for it.

Who are “we”? The government, of course, supported – however unwillingly – by us taxpayers. It is not automatically wrong that this should be so. Food is as important to secure as is the defence of the realm. The countryside is visible to almost all, and its character affects our health and spirits and secures the wellbeing of birds and beasts, trees and flowers. The government should have a care for it.

But it is only really because of the Second World War that Britain came to think of agriculture as government-directed. “Dig for Victory” the country was told, and the odd thing was that everyone was paid to go on digging long after the victory had been won. People who call today for government to save the environment often forget that it was mostly government that spent about 40 years ordering and paying for its destruction.

It wasn’t “we”, in this governmental sense, that made the land the productive and beautiful thing it mostly is. First, it was God, or Mother Nature, who gave this country the right contours and the right combination of day length and soil moisture. Second, it was those who owned the land and worked it. “Ask the men who mowed the hay”, as people used to say. It was their capital, their sweat and – which nostalgists forget – their technological innovation.

We live near Romney Marsh, which is part in Kent, part Sussex. Because of its wonderful soil, it is world-competitive in commercial agriculture. Because of its character as a large piece of partly watery flat land near the sea, it is also a nature conservation area with excellent birdlife. The marsh exists only because of the actions of men a long time ago. In the Middle Ages, they took advantage of a natural falling of sea levels. They pushed back the sea walls and cut deep dykes in the recovered land, “inning” the resulting fields. They prospered from the land created. In the court room of the (very old) New Hall in Dymchurch, there is a message inscribed for all the “lords of the levels”, “bailiffs” and “jurats” who sat there: “Fear God. Honour the King. But first look to the wall”.

Ed Ling, British Olympic bronze medalist in shooting, is back on his farm in Somerset.Credit:
Russell Sach

Yes, look to the wall today to remind yourself of what human beings can beneficially do by intervening in the environment. All that land was wrested from nature, to good effect. Even 700 years later, it remains astonishing. It wouldn’t be allowed today. Dame Helen Ghosh of the National Trust would be appalled at the threat to our precious natural coastline. The Green Blob would protest at the rape of the sea by commercial greed. The “precautionary principle” would stop it. Any Defra secretary bold enough to support it would be beaten down to a piddling little “pilot scheme” which protesters would infest. Then she would be sacked.

People paid to do nothing are naturally more inclined to do so – especially if, when they try to do something new, the authorities tell them not to.

And look to the wall to understand the importance and precariousness of what you have got. Don’t scorn the continuing benefit of living in a temperate, fertile country which can produce good food at competitive prices. But don’t, on the other hand, be so crazy for production that you damage the quality of what earlier generations created.

All this seems worth saying because most of the protagonists in this debate are stuck in a CAP/subsidy/regulatory mindset in which the only game is to struggle for public money and power while pretending to be interested in something else. The green lobbies are beside themselves, because they will no longer get their way supported by Brussels grants and by schmoozing Brussels officials. The National Trust, which owns 618,000 acres, and wishes to burnish its environmental credentials, naturally seeks a revised subsidy regime, where all the money goes to environmental projects. The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) wanted us to stay in the EU because it could not imagine a world without Brussels-negotiated handouts.

England – and, separately, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland – does now have a chance to think differently. If we want a policy, we can shape it for our own needs, not trying to balance those of 28 countries stretching from Malmo to Marsaxlokk. No “three-crop rule”, no “disallowance”, no “green-plating” of EU regulations, no compulsion to ban Roundup.

We can also take control of our borders not only for people (that vast, separate subject), but also for animals and plants which may bring in diseases. Our agricultural trade with the wider world can benefit from being outside the EU’s common external tariff.

In the breathing space, recently announced by Philip Hammond, which guarantees present subsidies until 2020, people can consider the ill effect of the old regime.

Essentially, it prevents innovation. Owen Paterson, the former Defra secretary, calls the EU the “museum of world farming”. He wants the Government to impose an “innovation principle” on its own activities: whenever it considers a new rule or prohibition, it should be forced to consider the damage to innovation.

Sussex farmer catches dust devil in action

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You can see that damage in the lives of farmers themselves. On average, they are older than ever before (partly because of the need to keep farming to preserve inheritance tax relief), and therefore less innovative. Substantial numbers depend on the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS), which really just pays them for existing. People paid to do nothing are naturally more inclined to do so – especially if, when they try to do something new, the authorities tell them not to. The supply of new land for new people to try new things is restricted by old planning rules and old owners.

Where does the public good lie? Obviously not in the war, fomented by militant greenery, in which the people who work the land are the enemy. It will come out of the recognition that the needs of farming and of conservation are reconcilable – for example, that the offsetting concept behind the Environment Bank makes sense, that genetically modified (GM) crops hugely reduce the need to spray, and that the idea that if you farm inefficiently, you are helping wildlife, is a bit mad.

This reconciliation can only happen by reconsidering that word “we” with which I began. In practice, to get anything actually done, “we” means “they” – farmers and landowners, not officials and lobby groups. Farmers are multi-functional and adaptable if the opportunity is there. “They” are the best agents of change “we” want. Let’s hear their ideas.